I love the idea of electrifying everything and turning off the blue flames of fossil fuels in factories, power stations and households as rapidly as possible – for all the reasons Saul Griffith sets out. His commitment to addressing global heating, his enthusiasm for stopping burning things, his stories of community commitment and his powerful arguments underpinned by careful calculation are compelling and inspiring. Reducing greenhouse gases, better air quality, improved health, better energy security, cheaper energy, a more sustainable built environment from replacing 101 million machines with new, more efficient, better and more climate-friendly machines – what’s not to like?

But I would have liked Saul to address the question of whether we can afford it, if the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy destroys ecosystems? Can the Earth afford the transition to renewables if it is embedded in the linear business-as-usual, take-make-dispose model of unlimited consumerism and economic growth? There cannot be infinite growth on a finite planet. Without that recognition as the foundation, electrifying everything will boost economic growth and consumerism (with a green salve) while continuing to destroy biodiversity, extract resources and dump waste, in largely hidden practices.

How effective is the electric transformation if there are three Teslas and a heavy electric truck in the renovated garage? If we do not “internalise the externalities” of the resource extraction needed to produce these vehicles, or the new transmission infrastructure to convey that electricity, it will be a recipe for community conflict. Already, mines such as that proposed by Venture Minerals in the Tarkine forest are justified on the basis that boron is “an important and versatile element in the modern world, used in everything from computer screens to fertilisers to creating powerful magnets for wind turbines and EVs (electric vehicles).”

Gangs on the streets of Brisbane and Sydney are stealing catalytic converters from the exhaust systems of our petrol fleet to recover precious minerals such as platinum, while governments don’t bother to recycle cars or whitegoods to recover metals and rare minerals and instead send them for waste disposal and approve new mines. The failure to manage waste from the technological revolution is evident in the mountains of e-waste that pile up or are exported. What will happen to 20 million cars and gas burners over a decade?

Saul has started charting a critical path. As we walk it, we must keep in mind that climate and biodiversity are two sides of the same coin. We cannot destroy one in the name of the other. Electrification has to occur within ecosystem limits, not by “offsetting” or ignoring or trashing these limits.

But this is possible. At the end of his essay, Saul argues that “we can show the world later this century what a circular economy really looks like.”

In a linear economy, to quote an online reference, “raw materials are retrieved and made into products that are used until they are discarded as waste. This economic system relies on selling as many products as possible,” even when there is a focus on “eco-efficiency,” or minimising the ecological impact to get the same output.

By contrast, a circular economy focuses on reducing, reusing and recycling. “Resource use is minimised (reduce). Reuse of products and parts is maximized (reuse). And last but not least, raw materials are reused (recycled) to a high standard. This can be done by using goods with more people, such as shared cars. Products can also be converted into services, such as [the way] Spotify sells listening licences instead of CDs. In this system, value is created by focusing on value preservation … This means that not only the ecological impact is minimized, but that the ecological, economic and social impact is even positive.”

We can advocate energy efficiency and, as Saul outlines, pull government levers to constrain demand, meet supply, change consumer attitudes and prompt innovation within existing development footprints. Sulphur batteries, for example, don’t need scarce resources such as cobalt. Fuel efficiency standards, building standards, EV targets, sunset dates for fossil-fuel machines or weight-based road charges, separate bike lanes and removal of electric-bike power limits, community-based feed-in tariffs – all these should be part of a government plan to complement individual and community plans. But we need to acknowledge that ultimately we must pull those levers in a circular economy which is not divorced from local biodiversity and waste streams. How much better to have a distributed rooftop solar generator than to destroy a forest or unique ecosystem? How much better to protect a forest and recover metals and minerals from obsolete machines rather than dig a new mine?

Reducing demand for metals and minerals and land for new generation, along with establishing facilities to recover and recycle resources – this is what must be installed as the Electrify Everything transformation gets underway. Once the energy transformation is embedded in the linear economy and runs parallel to the fossil-fuel economy, it will be almost impossible to retrofit. The country will have lost the jobs and social and environmental benefits of cradle-to-grave resource recovery, better urban design opportunities from electrification of the transport fleet, and it will have torn itself apart. Communities are already becoming polarised and conflict-ridden over congested cities, overcrowded parking areas, resource extraction, mines, land alienation, transmission and biodiversity impacts consequent upon the existing transition – let alone before we become a renewable energy “Superpower” supplying energy to meet overseas demands as well as our own. Yet we have a great opportunity to embed circular principles now, and we must do so to maintain ecosystems, community cohesion and the social licence for renewable energy.

To be a truly transforming force, Electrify Everything has to be more than a politically safe, siloed, clean-energy initiative; it must repudiate the discourse of delay that has overtaken Australian politics. We have shifted from a “fossil-fuel only” economy to a “let’s have it both ways” economy. Let’s maintain fossil fuels and delay the transition for as long as we can, but at the same time, in parallel, create new businesses and exports from a clean economy sector and facilitate them both with “offsets.” It is a deliberate and successful “divide and rule” strategy to smother dissent from the climate activist community. It is an economic growth strategy based on exporting fossil fuels and building clean energy infrastructure as if the two were completely compatible. It is a “something for everyone” climate and energy strategy.

Many who argue for the transition to renewables deliberately avoid hard-edged condemnation of the delay discourse to maintain political access. Embracing technological optimism and a “carrots, not sticks” approach sits as happily with Woodside as it does with climate investor groups. The “just pass it” mentality that drove the 43 per cent emissions reduction target and the Safeguard Mechanism is the politics of delay.

Saul notes the way government and regulatory bodies such as the AEMO have, in recent years, maintained the status quo and delayed the transformation from fossil fuels to renewable energy. But he doesn’t take the next step and call for the complete clean-out of these bodies. I do. We are entering a period of chaos, greenwashing and bad decisions because the regulatory authorities are not up to the challenge and are committed to business as usual.

Christine Milne